By June 1944, southern England was a vast marshalling yard for military supplies. Here, women of the Auxiliary Territorial Service check that tyres are fully inflated.
NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD ELSIE CAMPBELL had been at work for an hour or so on the evening of Saturday, 3 June when she was struck by the feeling that life was about to take a turn for the better. This was partly because it was almost her birthday. At midnight she would be twenty – no longer a teenager – and she was intending to celebrate. Her friend Brenda had promised a birthday luncheon at the Red Lion in Fareham. But the pub lunch was not the principal cause of her excitement. She had just made a momentous discovery – an exhilarating one.
Miss Campbell worked in one of the most secure strongholds in the country: a sprawling underground bunker buried 100 feet beneath the Hampshire coastline. Fort Southwick was the nerve centre for Operation Overlord, a hub from which radar reports were cross-referenced with messages from ships at sea in order to provide an accurate picture of what was taking place in the English Channel. As such, it was a key part of the D-Day chain of command.
Miss Campbell and her girlfriends referred to the fort as a ‘rabbit warren’.1 It was indeed – a labyrinth of tunnels that had been hacked through the Portsmouth bedrock by army sappers two years earlier. It was deep enough to withstand the heaviest Luftwaffe bombing raid.
The tunnels had been lined with fluorescent tubes and the light in this subterranean world was bright and shrill. Time held little meaning for the 700 staff who worked here, as the lighting was constant, whether it was midday or midnight. The electric glare was certainly no substitute for daylight. Several of Miss Campbell’s fellow workers had been obliged to undergo sessions of sun-ray treatment in order to return colour to their pallid skin.
This grid-like warren of tunnels was packed with state-of-the-art wireless equipment. The first time Miss Campbell descended the 168 stairs that led into UGHQ – the acronym for Underground Headquarters – she found herself glimpsing an alternative world that was driven by the latest technology. At its heart was the Operations Plotting Room, an excavated chamber that stood higher than a double-decker bus. It contained a gigantic table-top map of the English Channel, studded with scores of miniature ships. Each time a ship moved, the corresponding miniature was likewise shifted.
In close proximity to the Operations Plotting Room was the Q Message Room (Q was the code for deception) as well as the naval cipher officers. There was also a wireless telegraphy office and a ‘crypto’ office that always seemed to be locked. Miss Campbell never discovered what took place behind its doors.
Her shift that day had begun like any other. As she made her way on foot to Fort Southwick, she paused for a moment at the top of Portsdown Hill in order to admire the panorama spread out below. The sky was lead-grey and the dirt-coloured sea was in full churn as it surged in from the Atlantic. This blustery backdrop did nothing to distract from the ‘wonderful view of Portsmouth Harbour’. As far as she could see, there was ‘a solid mass of ships and landing craft of every description’.2 There were hundreds of them, thousands even: battleships, destroyers, corvettes, minesweepers, tugs and landing craft – ships of every possible shape and size. Above them hung huge white barrage balloons, bloated like the famous Michelin man. Attached to the vessels by invisible wires, these puffed-up bladders offered a protection of sorts against the Luftwaffe. Miss Campbell’s workmate, Doris Buttle, was quick to notice that they were much lower in the sky than usual on that particular evening. It gave her a moment’s pause for thought. She couldn’t help wondering if ‘something momentous was about to happen’.3
Miss Campbell took her seat beside a team of like-minded young women: Molly Carter, Sarah ‘Skippy’ Wilson and Mary Deacon-Pickles, some working in signals, some working on the switchboards. They were a close-knit band with a shared outlook. One of their colleagues, Alison Edye, felt as if she were living ‘in a honeycomb with all the other busy bees’.4 All were dressed in bell-bottom trousers rather than skirts, ‘in view of the damp in the tunnels’,5 and each of them sat in front of an RCA AR88 receiver, tuning the dials in order to keep it at a frequency of 535 kHz.
After an hour or so of work, they looked forward to the ‘corned beef sarnie’6 that was delivered to their desks by the canteen staff. On occasions, they were also given cups of cocoa enriched with fat from the corned beef cans. It sounded disgusting and tasted little better, but it provided them with energy to push through the night.
Nothing of significance happened during the early part of Miss Campbell’s shift, just the usual ‘ships passing to and fro’. But a little after 10 p.m., she detected an unexpected change in tone in the messages. ‘A signal’ – far more powerful than usual – ‘gave news of a convoy sailing from the West Country.’
This was most irregular and what made it even stranger was the fact that its destination flashed up as ‘the Far Shore’. Miss Campbell knew that this was one of the codenames for Normandy. With growing excitement, she began to track other signals before whispering to her friends. ‘It was obvious that the second front, so long awaited, was at last taking place.’
Elsie Campbell was extremely sharp; she now started to note down the positions of the ships in order to calculate the most likely time when the men would be landing. ‘By studying all the signals, it was possible to work out that D-Day was planned for Monday, 5 June.’7 If all went to schedule, the men would be starting their historic landing in France within the next thirty hours.
Miss Campbell would be proven correct in her calculation but wrong in her assumptions – for that tempestuous June night was to be full of surprises.
Lashed by rain and shivering into his bones, Howard Vander Beek spat a curse at the waters of the English Channel. This was the sort of night to be spent on land, in the cosy warmth of the Minerva Inn. It was the sort of night to draw the curtains and batten down the hatches. But it was certainly not the sort of night to be out at sea.
Vander Beek and his American crew were braving a sharp spring storm that was pitching six-foot waves against the hull of their diminutive vessel, LCC 60. Vander Beek had sea legs of steel and a stomach of concrete, yet even he was finding the sea ‘abusively choppy and disagreeable’. He had been warned that ‘the Channel weather was the worst in twenty years’, but he hadn’t expected it to be quite so relentless. He and his crew had been at sea for eight hours and they were feeling ‘weary and cold from the bitter winds’.8 Vander Beek wiped the spray from his Westclox watch. Almost midnight. Another six hours to go.
Vander Beek was the senior officer aboard LCC 60 – a strong-jawed, white-toothed twenty-seven-year-old from Oskaloosa, Iowa. His wave of blond hair and sharply knotted tie lent an Ivy League preppiness to his nautical dress – at least it did when he was on dry land. But now, after so many hours at sea, his hair was sluiced with salt and his necktie sodden and listing.
Vander Beek was known as ‘Boss’ and he was a natural leader. This was just as well, for his job was to sail in the vanguard of Force U, the huge fleet of ships destined for Utah Beach. It consisted of twelve separate convoys that had sailed from their anchorages at Belfast, Plymouth, Torbay, Weymouth and Dartmouth before grouping together in the English Channel. It was one of the greatest flotillas in history, consisting of 865 vessels that included battleships, destroyers and frigates. Yet Force U was just one of five fleets that were destined to sail to Normandy on D-Day, one for each beach. Since Utah was the furthest of the five landing beaches, its fleet had been the first to set sail. The other four were not due to leave their ports for some hours.
In the stormy blackness of the English Channel, only a handful of the leading vessels were visible through the spindrift. When Vander Beek glanced back into the night, they appeared to him as ‘silent dark hulks crashing through the ever-mounting waves’.
His responsibility was an onerous one for someone so young, yet his position at the front of Force U was just one of his duties. Once the fleet had arrived at its anchorage off Utah Beach, he had an even more exacting task to perform. He was to guide the scores of landing craft to the shore, leading them to the exact spot where the men would begin their invasion. One slip, one mistake, and disaster could ensue. For if the men were landed at the wrong place, the long months of training would all have been in vain.
Such an important mission required a special ship and LCC 60 was exactly that. She was a control vessel powered by two 255-horsepower engines that enabled her to cruise at close to fourteen knots. The men had nicknamed her Lily Cup Cruiser, but the quaintness of the name did not equate to comfort. Just fifty-six feet long and little wider than a London bus, her below-decks space was minuscule and crammed with weaponry and nautical equipment that included smoke-pots for signalling, an odograph for measuring distance and two fathometers or depth finders. These last two items would be needed to help guide the landing craft to the shore.
The role entrusted to Vander Beek and his men was so important that it had been kept under wraps. The vessel, too, had been kept concealed until a few days before their departure from Plymouth. This secrecy had engendered a close camaraderie among the crew. ‘Solid kinship’, was how Vander Beek saw it. He had trained for more than a year with three of the men and fought with three others in Sicily. They shared opinions in the same way as they shared their food. And now, as the Channel gale flung ‘raw salt spray’ into their eyes, they were all sharing the same thought: that this was the worst possible night for launching the largest seaborne invasion in history.
The weather was not the only reason for their anxiety. Something unsettling had happened a week earlier, something so alarming that it was still preying on their minds. It had taken place one evening when they tuned into Axis Sally, an American broadcaster producing propaganda for the Nazis. She was popular with the crew, even though a traitor to her country, because she played the latest American hits. But on this particular evening the music was to strike a discordant note. She had just played ‘As Time Goes By’ when, to Vander Beek’s astonishment, she addressed him and his men directly. ‘Tonight I want to talk seriously with Sims [Gauthier] and Howard [Vander Beek] and their crew over in Plymouth.’
The men could scarcely believe their ears. ‘You are sitting there thinking that you will soon be in on an invasion of this mighty continent,’ she said. ‘Your stupid leaders are making plans to force you to sacrifice your lives to do it. This is a huge fortress, and if you come near it, all of you will die violent deaths.’ She suggested it would be better for them to go back to their loved ones in the United States ‘while you still can’.
Axis Sally’s comments left the men with a deep sense of disquiet. Not only did she know their names, but she also knew all about their secret vessel, LCC 60. She described the boat, outlined her function and even discussed the men’s recent activities, down to ‘the scraping and painting the crewmen had done that very Saturday afternoon’. They listened ‘in frozen silence’, mystified as to how she could know such things.
They got their answer soon afterwards. Two of the crew recalled chatting to ‘a friendly old British couple’ while they had been scraping down the hull. The couple had heaped praise on the Americans and then asked a number of detailed questions. Seduced by the couple’s smiles, the men had been happy to provide answers.
It was clear that Axis Sally could only have received her information from this seemingly benign pair of pensioners. Vander Beek realized that they had been ‘able to garner all they wanted to know about us in order to transmit it by wireless for Sally’s use that evening. Well trained and cleverly disguised, they had been Nazi spies.’9 He never discovered whether or not the authorities arrested the couple. Even if they had, the damage had been done. The element of surprise, so crucial to the invasion, seemed to have been lost.
Howard Vander Beek’s sense of unease was shared by the men on board one of the Force U destroyers following in their wake. USS Corry was a bolts and steel leviathan in comparison to Vander Beek’s tiny craft – a big-gunned destroyer with a top speed of almost forty knots. She was well equipped to deal with anything that the German shore batteries might hurl at her. Yet an atmosphere of collective doubt had pervaded the vessel ever since she left harbour. To those on board, it felt as if there were a dark spell hanging over the ship. When the vessel’s radio operator, Bennie Glisson, had descended into the mess hall for his dinner that evening, he found it ‘as silent as a tomb’. He turned to his shipmates and attempted to lighten the atmosphere. ‘You guys act like you’re eating your last meal.’ No one laughed, nor even looked up, so he ate his turkey dinner in silence. The usual banter had been replaced by an all-pervading gloom that was ‘comparative to a funeral crossing’.10
The loss of morale had taken hold on the previous evening, when the ship’s captain, Lieutenant Commander George Hoffman, gathered the crew on deck for a pre-sailing pep talk. Instead of lifting their spirits with a rousing call to arms, he warned them of the dangers that lay ahead and concluded by saying that each and every one of them was ‘expendable’.11 It was an unfortunate choice of vocabulary. One of Benny Glisson’s fellow radio operators, Lloyd ‘Red’ Brantley, felt the optimism vanish in a flash. ‘People were kind of in shock.’12
Captain Hoffman was unaware of the damage he had done. He had spent the last four hours on the bridge, staring into the rain-slashed darkness as he tried to keep his eye fixed on the LCC 60. Also on the bridge was Robert Beeman, a smart young graduate from Yale who had worked in naval intelligence before being assigned to USS Corry. His job was to transmit information to and from the ship’s operation centre below decks.
The relationship between Beeman and Hoffman was one of cool politeness, but there were unspoken tensions that had hitherto been kept bottled up. Beeman harboured private doubts about Commander Hoffman and felt he attached too much importance to outmoded naval traditions and too little to the technicalities of modern warfare. Hoffman was godson of Admiral George Dewey, the walrus-moustached hero of the Battle of Manila Bay, and he ‘liked us to know that his middle name’ – Dewey – ‘linked him to the famous admiral’.
There was certainly a touch of the martinet about Hoffman. A stickler for convention, he ‘firmly believed in the privileges and responsibilities of a commanding officer’ and was happy to let it be known that he had been awarded the Legion of Merit for sinking an enemy U-boat. He was rather less quick to acknowledge that he had been ‘royally chewed out’ by his naval superiors for ramming a crippled surfaced submarine, an action that could have seriously damaged his own ship. His naval bosses were so infuriated that they published their rebuke in the Anti-Submarine Warfare bulletin.
Hoffman seemed to have learned little from his mistakes. For now, as he steered USS Corry across the English Channel, he made another serious misjudgement. While still in shallow water, the ship’s sonar equipment detected something untoward on the seabed. This news was relayed to the bridge, where it prompted very different reactions from the two men at the controls. Beeman knew from experience that sonar readings were to be treated with caution, as they were often distorted by fish, kelp or even thermal gradients. ‘As we all knew, most of our contacts were not submarines.’13
But Hoffman took the decision to attack, displaying the same rashness as he had when he rammed the submarine. He ordered a 600-pound Mark VII depth charge to be dropped on to a target that might have been no more malign than a clump of seaweed. It was a dangerous gamble. The sea was just twenty-five fathoms deep and the depth charge was huge. When it exploded, it did so with such violence that USS Corry took much of the impact. The engine’s drainpipe was shattered, the radar knocked out and the main control system for the ship’s big guns was crippled. Although the engine and radar were patched up after a tense four hours, the control system was damaged beyond repair. USS Corry would be going into battle without being able to fire her five-inch guns automatically. They could still be used under manual control, ‘but with considerable loss of accuracy and rate of fire’.14
The ship ploughed on through the night, one of many hundreds in that vast fleet. It was stifling down in the bowels of the ship and the only noise was the throaty hum of the engines. There had been radio silence for hours, as all the ships of Force U were maintaining a blackout. But shortly before dawn, ‘all of a sudden’, three digits flashed over the system. Lloyd Brantley, the radio operator, looked at his code sheet and blinked in astonishment. ‘Oh my God!’15
He immediately showed the message to his fellow radioman, Mort Rubin. ‘Jesus Christ!’ said Rubin. The message informed them that D-Day had been postponed. The entire fleet of 865 vessels was told to turn in its tracks and head back to England.
Rubin was sceptical. ‘Could this be a fake message sent by the Germans?’ he wondered. ‘If so, it was certainly a beauty.’ Even if it was genuine, it was every captain’s nightmare. There was also the real possibility that some of the ships wouldn’t receive it and Rubin had visions of ‘a lone destroyer or minesweeper going in on its own private war and tipping our hand to the Germans’.16 It was imperative to inform the rest of the fleet.
Still in the vanguard was Howard Vander Beek’s LCC 60, which had been quick to pick up the coded Post Mike One postponement message. Within seconds of confirming its veracity, the craft swung back towards England in the hope that the hundreds of other vessels would follow suit.
In such choppy seas, this was a procedure fraught with complications. Many vessels were towing tugs, entailing ‘seamanship of a high order’. One false manoeuvre could easily result in tow-lines getting fouled around the screws. But as the weakest of dawns began to lick away the darkness, the mighty Force U performed perhaps the greatest U-turn in history, wheeling through a gigantic semicircle and heading slowly back to England.
There was bitter disappointment aboard the LCC 60. Howard Vander Beek’s men were ‘exhausted, saltwater-soaked and hungry’. For more than eighteen hours they had been pitched up crests and lurched into troughs, as if they were riding some sort of liquid bucking-bronco. Now, they were told to head for Weymouth and await further orders.
The only consolation came when Vander Beek was invited to spend the rest of that day in a ‘cosy old dwelling’ that belonged to a kindly English family. He ate ‘a wholesome meal’ and was then led to a ‘warm soft feather bed’.17 Yet he still felt a deep sense of disappointment. The first attempt at landing in occupied France had been thwarted not by Rommel, nor even by the German coastal guns, but by an enemy far closer to home: the atrocious English weather.
It was an enemy that had one last trick to play.
The wind was still gusting strongly on Sunday morning when Professor Walter Stübe arrived for work in his gilded office on the second floor of the Luxembourg Palace in Paris. The giant swastika at the front of the building was snapping angrily at the flagpole and the low cloud was whipping through the eaves and gables of the French capital.
Stübe was chief meteorologist to the Luftwaffe and he knew more than most about frontal systems and Atlantic depressions. He also knew that his world had been contracting with alarming speed. Just three years previously, he had access to advance weather information from as far afield as Jan Mayen Land, Greenland and Spitsbergen. But the German weather station on Jan Mayen Land had been abandoned and the one on desolate Sabine Island, in northern Greenland, had been destroyed by American bombers. Although meteorologists were still collecting weather data in Spitsbergen, little useful information ever reached Professor Stübe. This left him at a serious handicap. Unlike his Allied counterparts, who received data from across the North Atlantic, Stübe was reliant on information from Luftwaffe pilots returning from missions at sea.
His only other source was a naval officer in Le Havre, who telephoned him each evening with barometer readings and precipitation statistics. One who observed Stübe at work said he was engaged in ‘the most incredible crystal-ball gazing’ and Stübe himself was acutely aware of the impossibility of forecasting with any accuracy. ‘This,’ he remarked to one visitor, ‘is why I have white hair.’
Stübe met with senior staff officers at that Sunday’s 10.30 a.m. conference. He assured them there was no possibility of any Allied invasion for the next few days because ‘the weather situation was becoming worse.’ Information from Le Havre revealed that ‘the barometer was definitely going down and the cloud cover was eight-tenths below six hundred metres and ten-tenths above that.’18 In such conditions, Allied planes could not operate.
Stübe had studied previous Allied attacks (in Italy and elsewhere) and noted that they only invaded when there was a cast-iron guarantee of fine weather. Another sure sign that the invasion was not imminent was the fact that the northern coast of France would be under a full moon for the next three days. In Sicily, the Allies had attacked when the moon was in its first quarter. And in the deserts of North Africa, the British had never attacked during a full moon.
Once the morning conference was over, Professor Stübe telephoned his projections to Major Hermann Mueller, the chief meteorologist at Field Marshal von Rundstedt’s underground headquarters in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Stübe knew that von Rundstedt was ‘very conscious of the weather and took it quite seriously’:19 he wanted to give him the latest update. Major Mueller had also received some new data and it differed slightly from that of Stübe. It suggested that an airborne operation would be ‘broadly possible’20 and a seaborne landing conceivable, although the stormy conditions in the Channel made it far from ideal. Mueller agreed with the professor’s assessment that an imminent landing was most unlikely. He nevertheless asked for a review of the situation later that day, when the latest data had been received from Le Havre.
The updated information, when it arrived, only confirmed the two men’s earlier assessment. There was ‘no promise of good weather in the future’ and the stormy conditions were likely to intensify. The Luftwaffe considered the outlook so unfavourable that the anti-aircraft units were allowed to stand down.
Field Marshal Rommel shared his weathermen’s belief that there would be no Allied invasion for the foreseeable future. He noted that ‘the enemy has not made use of three periods of fine weather in May for his invasion’ and was convinced that ‘further periods of fine weather in the coming weeks cannot be reckoned on.’21 The gunmetal sky only served to confirm this opinion. When Rommel had awoken on that Sunday morning, the wind was moaning through the turrets of La Roche-Guyon and tugging at the heads of the giant rhododendrons, tearing at petals and strewing them into the gullies where they collected like patches of damp snow. The morning sky was so half-hearted that Rommel had been obliged to switch on his desk lamp.
His mind was now made up. He would leave for Germany that very morning in order to be with his wife, Lucie-Maria, for her birthday on 6 June. He had bought her a pair of hand-made grey suede shoes that were costly, chic and very Parisian. He was determined to give them to her in person.
Rommel had another reason for heading to Germany, one of even greater importance than his wife’s suede shoes. He was hoping to meet with Hitler in order to implore him to place the two panzer divisions stationed outside Paris – the 12th SS and Panzer Lehr – under his sole command. Rommel feared that without these panzers, he could not defeat the expected Allied invasion.
After a snatched breakfast of toast and honey, he bade a hasty farewell to his staff and climbed into his black convertible Horch. He placed the shoebox beside him and then turned to his chauffeur. ‘We can go now, Daniel.’22 He was anxious to get under way, for it was a twelve-hour drive to the family home in Herrlingen, southern Germany.
As the Horch swept down the drive, the sentries snapped a salute before closing the wrought-iron gates to Château de La Roche-Guyon.
Military planning officer Goronwy Rees shared one thing in common with Field Marshal Rommel: he knew that the Allied invasion was predicated upon fine weather. He was also one of only a handful of people to know exactly how Operation Overlord would unfold. He had served on General Montgomery’s staff for many months and helped to plan every aspect of the invasion. Now, as the big day approached, he had to get the finalized Operation Orders signed off by the various commanders-in-chief.
This was more time-consuming than he was expecting. When he took the document to Air Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory, ‘he insisted on reading the whole bloody thing from start to finish, trying to correct commas.’ Rees did his best to hurry him along. ‘It’s impossible to alter anything,’ he said. ‘It’s all been agreed.’23 But Leigh-Mallory was unmoved. He felt sure that in detail lay victory.
The success of Operation Overlord was contingent on there being a full moon and a flooding dawn tide. This greatly constricted the options for the date of the landings. Success was also contingent on the weather. Smooth seas, clear skies and nothing more than a light wind were all deemed essential. And this is where the problems began.
When General Eisenhower summoned his chief weatherman, James Stagg, to a meeting at 4.15 a.m. that Sunday, he was unaware that his three teams of meteorologists were at war with themselves. The American forecasters thought their British counterparts too cautious. The British thought the Americans too confident. And the naval forecasters were infuriated by James Stagg’s self-importance. ‘A glory hound’,24 was the opinion of Laurence Hogben, a young New Zealander on the last team.
The Americans were led by two ‘loud-mouthed’ Californians, Ben Holzman and Irving Krick, who had spent their pre-war years forecasting for Hollywood movie-makers. The bull-headed Krick was particularly irksome. Dismissed by his rivals as ‘a salesman to his fingertips’,25 his brash overconfidence led him to claim he could produce reliable forecasts for up to five days. This infuriated the British, who slapped him down with the retort that the English Channel was rather less predictable than the west coast of America.
It was a put-down that carried some weight. The British meteorological team was led by the veteran Charles ‘C.K.M.’ Douglas, a gaunt and austere individual whose ‘distant manner’26 masked an anabatic brain and a photographic memory of weather patterns stretching back to Edwardian times. He contended that Channel forecasts could not be predicted beyond forty-eight hours.
James Stagg’s task was to collate the three individual forecasts and knock them into a coherent report. But this was far from easy. Although he liked to present himself to General Eisenhower as a weatherman extraordinaire with his pulse on every frontal trough, he was not a trained meteorologist and his views were, as one of his forecasters put it, ‘not worth a damn’.27
He was increasingly drained by having to walk ‘on a not-very-tight tightrope’,28 especially as Eisenhower treated him as if he were in possession of a magic weather-wand. ‘Just name us five, fine calm days and we’ll go for it.’29 It sounded so easy, yet proved so difficult. That Sunday’s pre-dawn conference had been particularly tense, for Stagg had been forced to admit to Eisenhower that he saw no change to the atrocious spring weather. Indeed, he said that the cloud cover would be so thick in the coming days that air support would be impossible. Eisenhower gave a grim response. ‘If the air cannot operate, we must postpone.’30
In the hours since that pre-dawn meeting, Stagg’s day had taken a turn for the worse. His mid-morning conference call with the meteorologists ‘was the most heatedly argumentative’31 of them all, with no one agreeing on anything.
But every cloud has a silver lining and Stagg’s came in the form of a large cold front sweeping eastwards across the Atlantic. If the charts were correct, this would bring clear skies and calmer seas for much of Tuesday, 6 June. Not only was there a clear window of opportunity for the landings, but the air force would also be able to operate.
That Sunday evening, 4 June, as the clocks in Southwick House chimed 9.30 p.m., Stagg addressed General Eisenhower and his staff in the old library. The double blackout curtains had been tightly drawn, but the rain could be heard drilling hard against the panes of glass. Eisenhower’s three commanders-in-chief were present – Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, General Bernard Montgomery and Air Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory – along with their chiefs of staff.
Stagg delivered his upbeat forecast for 6 June and then answered questions from the assembled company. Once this was done, he left the room while Eisenhower made his final decision as to whether or not to launch the invasion. He was still chatting in the corridor when the Supreme Commander strode out of the library with a detectable spring in his step. ‘Well Stagg,’ he said with a broad smile, ‘we’re putting it on again. For heaven’s sake, hold the weather to what you told us.’32 A final and irrevocable decision would be taken at 4.15 a.m. the next day, but Eisenhower had fired the starting gun and it would soon be too late to halt the invasion.
As Stagg scuttled back to his tented billet in the woods that surrounded Southwick House, he hoiked his collar against the driving rain. The wind was still whipping a gale and the night sky was ‘heavily overcast with low cloud’.33 It was typically English weather.
By June 1944, southern England was a vast marshalling yard for military supplies. Here, women of the Auxiliary Territorial Service check that tyres are fully inflated.